UNESCO list

I read Sydney Lumet's Making Movies, David Lebedoff's the Same Man, Sadia Shepard's Girl from Foreign, Jozsef Lengyel's Prenn Drifting, Christer Kihlman's Sweet Prince, Aharon Megged's The Living on the Dead, and Jean Metellus' La Famille Vortex.

Vortex is the story of a family in Haiti, and I didn't find it very compelling. Megged's novel is about a writer's failure to write a biography, and in the process gives us a fresco of Israeli life. I rather liked it. Prenn Drifting is about a misfit who becomes a revolutionary during World War I in Hungary. I found it interesting primarily for the political overtones, and it was those overtones which led the Communist government at the time to select it for the UNESCO list. Sweet Prince is the story of an unlikely community near a garbage dump in Norway. I have such a pristine memory of Norway that I asked myself: are there garbage dumps in Norway? I found it hard to care about the characters in this one.

I enjoyed Shepard. It was an interesting book to read, about a woman looking for her Jewish roots in India, when she is born of a Muslim mother and an Episcopalian father in the US. I am used to thinking about all these religions not just as distinct, but somehow antithetical. I also thoroughly enjoyed reading Lumet. It's a quick, easy read that really gave me the feeling of what it is like to make a movie. I read the rehearsal process with great attention. Lebedoff, I have to say, disappointed me. I got the feeling a full biography of either Waugh or Orwell would have been too hard for this author, so he tries and fails to combine the two. His argument that both authors were similar fails -- the book is about their numerous differences. It was not well written, which attracts the eye a lot more these days.